The present invention relates generally to storage systems and, more particularly, to reducing workload in a storage system.
The amount of digital data is growing rapidly. As a result, a storage subsystem is required to provide more storage capacity. To utilize storage resources better, a storage subsystem provides data reduction features such as compression and deduplication. These features, however, consume more computing resources such as processor and memory of storage subsystem. To improve data reduction workload, specialized hardware for processing such as compression and deduplication is provided. This kind of hardware acts as the gateway between server and storage. For example, US2009/0063528 discloses a method for de-duplicating redundant data in memory, storage, or both, comprising: providing a virtualization layer on a computer architecture comprising memory for temporarily storing data, and storage for persistently storing data.
The specialized hardware approach is difficult to expand capacity according to the usage of data store, I/O, and processor/memory. Also, it is difficult to migrate from running process on the storage subsystem without disrupting existing connection between host and storage. US2009/0063528 does not show how to migrate from running process on the storage subsystem without disrupting existing connection between host and storage.